Armed and Dangerous

Hi guys,

A cool event happened last night. We have been teaching Special Forces medics to intubate and use various intubating devices. The surgeons also let them scrub-in and perform various surgeries; all in effort to help them keep up their skills. These are real high speed guys, as you can imagine. So as payback they took some of us out to the special ops firing range and gave us familiarization training with various weapons. I got to fire the full auto M240 7.62 cal. machine gun and the 5.56 SAW. These are belt fed baby! Full auto, tearing it up just like Rambo. We also got to fire full auto AK 47s and HK submachine guns. They had a whole arsenal of captured weapons we could handle, play with, and fire. We shot from 9:00 until midnight. The big machine guns are like handling a jackhammer. We got to do all kind of special-ops firing like moving and running with the weapons. To top it off helicopters were flying by after a mission and popped flares as they passed. It was really spectacular. I was so tired the next day but it was worth it. I’ll never get to do that again in my life. I’ve included a pic of me with a captured AK47 all chromed out Gangsta style. Even in Iraq the insurgents have to show off the bling.

I almost forgot. Here's a link to a video article from The Detroit Free Press about medical care and AirEvac from Balad. I haven't seen it myself because of bandwidth constraints so let me know if it is good.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200660326004